Life in Culebrón

Humankind has a long relationship with mind altering substances. We chew mushrooms and leaves, we sniff things, we smoke all sorts of vegetation, we (not me you understand but we, humankind) drink snow laced with reindeer urine and, for lots of us there is a close relationship with fermented and distilled alcohol. Around here the most obvious local booze is wine, and the variants on it like vermouth, but there are others. In fact, years ago, I wrote an article about it for the old TIM magazine. That TIM article was inspired by a visit to the bar in Calle Sol in the Santa Catalina district of Pinoso. We were in Santa Catalina for their fiestas, I had never been in the bar there and, once inside, I realised that every second person in the bar was drinking cantueso. I'd been blissfully unaware of its existence till that moment but it's actually readily available around here. It's fine, not my preferred tipple but, if you like the brandy based drinks like Ponche Caballero, you ...

Being remarkably hip and cool, or whatever you say nowadays for being hip and cool - straight fire Gucci maybe - we go to see a fair number of contemporary musicians. Just so my mum understands I mean pop festivals. We go to see the town band too so, really, we're neither hip nor cool. Never mind. At a music festival, in non Covid times, the security check at the entrance was to look for anything unsafe and to root out food and drink. Nobody likes to pay festival prices for beer or for a rum and coke. Festivals aren't permanent events, more or less by definition. The jobs they provide are temporary. Most of the staff are temporary. And temporary tends to unknown and unknown tends to untrustworthy. Years ago the daughter of one of my work colleagues went to Ibiza for the summer season to work in a bar. The young woman turned up, sober and unstoned, on time, every day, for the whole of her contract. Her boss was so unused to this responsible behaviour from his young, temporary ...

I know it's perverse but I was pondering on the romanticism of the drunk the other day. Actually it was probably whilst I was in the HiperBer supermarket trying to decide whether to buy whisky or brandy. That pondering led me down Memory Lane - what was the name of that journalist? The one with the byline "so and so is unwell". The phrase appeared when there was no column because the man was too far gone to write. As I vainly struggled, synapses and neurons not doing what they should, that Mike Figgis film, the one with Elisabeth Shue and a Nicolas Cage bent on self destruction, came to mind. I liked the Cage character and I enjoyed the film. I occasionally wonder whether my own days will end in an alcoholic stupor. That's where this post ground to a halt. I couldn't remember the name and I'd forgotten what the point of the post was going to be so I went to bed. When I awoke in the morning I was thinking Geoffrey. In fact it's Jeffrey, Google remembere...

This morning Spanish radio was quoting from an article in the Times. The original impetus for the Times story came from a scientific paper in the Lancet which predicted that Spaniards, by 2040, will be the longest lived nation in the World, overtaking the Japanese. It's not much of a predicted difference - 85.8 years for the Spanish and 85.7 for the Japanese. If RNE 1 can pinch an idea from the Times. which pinched it from the Lancet, I don't see why I shouldn't join in by appropriating information from the freebie newspaper 20 minutos. The prediction for the UK is 83.3 years by the way. The 20 minutos title was "They drink, they smoke; why do Spaniards live so long?" In the piece it says that more Spaniards than Brits smoke, 23% versus 16%, the alcohol intake is more or less the same and both nations sleep, on average, the same number of hours. The Times suggested a few key differences. Apparently Spaniards walk more, not in a strenuous way but in the idea ...